CI: Lesson - The Subjunctive Mood - Introduction

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Latin uses three moods, two of which we have been using up to now:

  • The indicative mood for statements of fact
  • The imperative mood for direct 2nd person commands
  • The subjunctive mood, when needing to express anything other than statements of fact or 2nd person commands

What is the Subjunctive Mood?

The subjunctive mood is a mood covering possibility, wishes, and various other specialized constructions. Unlike the indicative and imperative, English has almost no remaining true subjunctive forms, making the subjunctive mood one of the more technically difficult grammatical forms to master. However, you will discover that the introduction of the subjunctive opens up a wide variety of constructions which were not previously available. Ways of speaking that are common in English, but handled through elaborate constructions of helping verbs, are instead completed by using a new set of subjunctive forms in Latin. Before we can explore the uses of this new mood, we must first explore those new forms.

Tenses of the Subjunctive Mood

Unlike the indicative mood, which utilizes six tenses (present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect, future perfect), the subjunctive mood has only four tenses:

  • present
  • imperfect
  • perfect
  • pluperfect

You will immediately notice that the Latin subjunctive lacks any future tense forms, whether regular future tense or future perfect.

Subjunctive Inflections

While the appearance of the subjunctive tenses differs from their indicative counterparts, you will notice that three things remain the same:

  1. Active Personal Endings:
    • o/m, s, t, mus, tis, nt
    • These six personal endings remain in use in the subjunctive mood.
    • Subjunctive will use -m for 1st person singular, rather than -o.
  2. Passive Personal Endings for the Present System:
    • r, ris, tur, mur, mini, ntur
    • These six personal endings remain in use in the subjunctive mood.
  3. Perfect System - passive voice formation:
    • perfect participle + form of sum
    • The same formation rules will be used to create the perfect passive system, but with new forms of sum.

With that in mind, we see that what remains to be learned are the changes that occur to a verb before you add these familiar endings. The next few pages will explore each subjunctive mood tense.